Category: News

NeuroInsights have released a report on the neurotechnology industry that uncovers the growing market for brain-based goods and services.

The 350 page report will set you back $4,500 (that’s almost $13 dollars a page!), but has been summarised by Zack Lynch, the company’s managing director, on his blog.

Some of the highlights include:

2006 venture capital investment in neurotechnology rose 7.5% to $1.666 billion

Neurotech industry revenues rose 10% in 2006 to $120.5 billion; this includes neuropharmaceutical revenues of $101 billion, neurodevice revenues of $4.5 billion, neurodiagnostic revenues of $15 billion

The Neurotech Index of publicly-traded neurotechnology companies was up 53% from its December 31, 2003 conception to March 31, 2006, outpacing the NASDAQ Biotech Index which gained 7% during the same period

In other words, the brain is big money, and it’s only likely to get bigger.

Needless to say, this makes us, the brain-owning public, equally blessed and cursed.

Commercial companies want us to spend our money on their products, meaning as well as developing technologies, they are likely to promote new ideas of well-being or ill-health to motivate us to use them.

This also tends to mean that problems faced by those with money (i.e. people in developed countries) get priority over the problems more typical of less developed countries.

So, treaments for diseases endemic in the developing world, like sleeping sickness, caused by trypanosoma infection and leading to brain disorder and eventual death, will likely be slow in coming.

However, we can be sure that some new advances in commercial neuroscience will be of huge benefit to many people.

The difficulty for us, and the investors, is that sometimes it is only clear which of the advances is significant with the benefit of hindsight.

Link to NeuroInsights industry report with free executive summary.
Link to Zack Lynch’s summary and comments.

PsyBlog has just published the first part of a guide to online psychology and neuroscience blogs, and says some jolly nice things about Mind Hacks in the process.

PsyBlog author Jeremy also highlights a few more of the many good online reads, but is too modest to mention himself, so I thought I’d pitch in an redress the balance.

Go see PsyBlog, it certainly deserves to be on the list.

Link to PsyBlog Guide to Psychology Blogs – Part 1.

I’ve just discovered online science mag Inkling Magazine and noticed that their Human Nature section is full of great mind and brain articles.

Recent articles cover the safety of antidepressants for teenagers, the health risks of love and a brief interview with neuroscientist, author and stroke survivor Jill Bolte Taylor.

There’s a whole stack more, so have a browse and see what lights your candle.

Link to Inkling’s ‘Human Nature’ articles.

BBC’s Newsnight programme just had an interesting video report on the renewed debate about whether mental health services are institutionally racist.

While these accusations have been made for some time, what is new is that some black and ethnic minority mental health workers who work in these communities are starting to argue that this label actually makes it more difficult to provide fair treatment to their patients.

The subject was recently tackled in one of regular debates held at the Maudsley Hospital in South East London, which is available online as a podcast.

It is widely known that in the UK, black and ethnic ethnic minority people are much more likely to be diagnosed with a psychotic mental illness, such as schizophrenia, than other members of society.

While this was originally thought to be a sign of racism in itself, studies have suggested that this pattern is true of almost all immigrant communities (e.g. Finnish immigrants to Sweden), rather than simply a black and white issue, and that the rates still hold when psychiatrists are asked to diagnose cases based only on their symptoms with the ethic origin hidden.

The debate has now largely moved on and the focus is now on outcomes and experiences in the mental health system.

For example, regardless of the higher rates of psychosis, it seems that when in contact with mental health services, outcomes for Afro-Carribean people are much worse than white people.

This is where the subtlety in the debate lies. Higher rates of diagnosis in one racial group are not necessarilly a sign of discrimination, but poorer outcomes after treatment has started are more likely to suggest this group is not being fairly treated.

An influential report called ‘Breaking the Circles of Fear’ found that people from ethnic minorties tend to have a more negative experience of the mental health system and fear the consequences of becoming involved with it.

Furthermore, it found that mental health professionals were often afraid of talking about race issues for fear of appearing racist.

Psychiatrists Prof Swaran Singh (pictured) and Dr Shubulade Smith argue in the video report that accusations of racism actually make it more difficult for people from ethnic minority communities to get fair treatment, as it interferes with sensible clinical decision making.

In contrast, campaigners like Lee Jasper and psychiatrist Dr Kwame McKenzie argue that unless we admit that the system is racist, problems won’t be adequately addressed.

One important factor might be that immigrant communities tend to be poor, live in urban environments, have weaker family support and have higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse, all of which have been found to increase rates of schizophrenia.

This makes it difficult to disentangle the effects of mental health treatment, and a society where black and ethnic minority groups are more likely to live stressful and depressed communities.

The fact that ethnic minority psychiatrists are now starting to challenge the idea that the mental health system is racist must be a positive sign, however, as twenty years ago, most would be in agreement that it was not set up to deal with the needs of minority communities.

Link to BBC News on the debate with video report.
Link to podcast of Maudsley Debate ‘The Race Blame Game’.

Online science magazine Litmus Zine has a interesting report of one person’s experience of last year’s LSD conference that was convened to discuss the science of this curious molecule and celebrate discover Dr Albert Hoffman’s 100th birthday.

The conference took place in Basel, Switzerland and the attendees were reportedly a strange mixture of neuroscientists, hippys, psychologists, artists, sociologists and visionaries.

The article weaves the history of LSD with the topics of the conference, giving an account of the drug’s past and present.

I’ve not come across Litmus Zine before, but it looks like it’s got some great content already online and aims to take a fresh approach to science writing.

Link to article ‘Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out ‚Ķ Get Well?’ (thanks Mat!)

New Scientist has an open-access article on the increasing tendency for atypical American children to be diagnosed with ‘juvenile bipolar disorder’.

Children are being increasingly diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the US, despite the fact that there is limited evidence for its validity and disagreement about its symptoms.

As we reported in a previous Mind Hacks article, mental disorder presents differently in children (for reasons that are not well understood) and diagnosis is fraught with difficulties.

Not least because children often are not able to report their thoughts and emotions adequately, and many different forms of distress get expressed as ‘misbehaviour’, making it hard to distinguish between different causes.

One of the other effects of the increasing number of children diagnosed with bipolar, is that an increasing number are being medicated with drugs that have barely been tested in anyone other than adults.

This is despite the fact that parenting programmes, such as the Webster-Stratton ‘Incredible Years‘ programme, are known to be effective ways of improving behaviour.

Advocates for the disorder argue that it has been previously unrecognised and only now is it being properly diagnosed, and that it causes serious distress and impairment in affected children and their families.

The NewSci article looks at some of the trends in diagnosis and treatment, and speaks to child mental health researchers on both sides of the fence.

Link to NewSci article ‘Bipolar children – is the US overdiagnosing?’.

Philip Dawdy is an investigative journalist who runs the Furious Seasons blog and he’s been on Eli Lilly’s case for some time.

He’s been following the ongoing legal proceedings over whether the drug company obscured information about the side effects of antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, and has been posting some seemingly incriminating documents online that have probably made the company quite uncomfortable.

His work has just got him a mental health award that was voted for by mental health professionals and service users.

It was created by a corporate sponsor who fund the award but get no say in who receives the honour. The name of the sponsor? Eli Lilly.

I love the smell of irony in the morning.

Link to Furious Seasons on forthcoming award.

Reporter Quinn Norton, who had a magnet implanted into her finger to allow her to ‘feel’ magnetic fields has finally had it removed – returning her to the normal world of the ‘five senses’.

We reported on the operation last year, and Norton wrote up her experiences in an extended Wired article that also looked at the role of body modification in extending the human sense range.

Norton notes that even though she glad she’s had the magnet removed (it wasn’t without problems – it broke up in her body and got infected) she still misses the extra sense:

In the background of all this are the questions the magnet led me to, the ones that make the magnet look pedestrian. Human augmentation and even advanced treatment really begin to erode at what we think humans are, in society, in the justice system, in medicine itself. What are we going to become inevitably is also the question of who we are now, and beginning to ask the former brings home how little we know about the later.

I’m excited and scared to be trying to find out. I miss my magnet, but I knew it wasn’t well understood when I started. I’m glad I know what a spinning drive and a ringing telephone wire feel like. I’m sad I can’t feel them anymore.

Link to Quinn Norton on losing her sixth sense.
Link to Wired article on magnet implant.

Security guru Bruce Schneier has written an insightful article for Wired about rational precautions for rare risks, and why the typical response after a rare catastrophe is usually psychologically satisfying but practically irrelevant.

He writes the article in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, which have caused a number of bizarre responses by people worried about whether it might happen again (banning fake guns in theatrical productions, for example).

Trying to reduce the risk from the rare people who are both violent and mentally disturbed is often the responsibility of forensic psychologists and psychiatrists.

Interestingly, they don’t spend their whole time thinking ‘how can we stop this person murdering someone’, as although this is the sort of thing that hits the headlines, it’s actually incredibly rare.

People who have already murdered someone are generally locked away and don’t pose much of a risk, but for someone who has never murdered anyone or never attempted to, predicting whether they will can be very difficult.

In fact, it’s difficult to gather data to determine whether your predictions are accurate or not.

Imagine you have a risk assessment that predicts that a person is highly likely to murder someone.

To best evaluate your prediction, you’d want to wait and see if it turns out to be true, but in these circumstances, you can’t. You have to intervene.

Once you’ve intervened, you don’t know whether your prediction was true or not.

Forensic mental health professions spend a lot of time thinking, as Schneier recommends, ‘have we done everything that is feasible to reduce the risk to the public based on what we know about the most common risks’.

In other words, they focus on the principle of maximising safety, rather spending all their time and energy on highly unlikely events that may be impossible to predict.

As they tend to be so frequently in touch with the legal system, their second line of thinking tends to be ‘if the extremely unlikely does occur, will we be seen to have done everything that was required by the courts’, because at the end of the day, the law is the final say on what is acceptable when predicting the unpredictable.

Link to ‘Virginia Tech Lesson: Rare Risks Breed Irrational Responses’.
Link to information on forensic psychology.
Link to online book on forensic psychiatry from the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

OmniBrain has alerted me to the fact that the winners of the 2007 Visual Illusion contest have been announced, with all of the top ten entries viewable online.

Most of the entries are animated and range from the striking to the subtle.

My favourite is the one pictured, simple but effective, which you really need to see in action to get the full effect.

There’s many more at the link below, most with psychological explanations of how they work.

Link to top 10 winners.

As an update to an earlier story, psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness has been announced as the winner of The Royal Society Prize for Science Books.

The book is a hugely entertaining look at the science of happiness, covering everything from brain science to decision making experiments using sandwiches.

It’s perhaps most interesting for presenting research on how bad we are at predicting how happy our choices will make us, and how future events will impact our sense of well-being.

One useful recent additon to the book’s website is a brief study guide for lecturers wanting to use the book, as Gilbert does, for teaching students.

Link to announcement from The Royal Society.
Link to coverage from BBC News.
Link to book website.
Link to Daniel Gilbert’s lab homepage.

The New York Times has another investigative article on the pharmaceutical industry, this time looking at how promotions aimed at psychiatrists encourage the prescription of antipsychotic drugs to children.

As far as I know, none of the newer ‘atypical’ antipsychotics are licensed for children (actually, I’d be interested to hear otherwise).

This doesn’t mean doctors can’t prescribe them, as they have the freedom to prescribe ‘off-label’ whatever they feel would help the individual, but it does mean that the drug companies can’t advertise them for this purpose.

‘Off-label’ drug promotion is illegal, but it is an open secret that it occurs widely.

Notably, the number of children prescribed atypical antipsychotics has soared in recent years, and in the only US state that keeps records of drug company promotional spending, promotional money seems to be a key factor:

From 2000 to 2005, drug maker payments to Minnesota psychiatrists rose more than sixfold, to $1.6 million. During those same years, prescriptions of antipsychotics for children in Minnesota’s Medicaid program rose more than ninefold.

Those who took the most money from makers of atypicals tended to prescribe the drugs to children the most often, the data suggest. On average, Minnesota psychiatrists who received at least $5,000 from atypical makers from 2000 to 2005 appear to have written three times as many atypical prescriptions for children as psychiatrists who received less or no money.

It seems that these drugs are increasingly being prescribed for a whole range of different disorders in children, despite limited evidence for their effectiveness in some conditions and a shocking lack of studies on the long-term effects.

The fact is, psychiatric drugs have an important and useful part to play in treating mental illness, sometimes even in children.

Unfortunately, this sort of underhand marketing and out-of-control prescribing puts some parents off when their children would genuinely benefit, and unnecessarily gives powerful and potentially dangerous drugs to some children when they could be helped in other ways.

The answer? Stick to the science when prescribing – just say no to drug promotion.

Link to article ‘Psychiatrists, Children and Drug Industry‚Äôs Role’

Prof Richard Wiseman tackles some of the quirkier findings in the psychological literature in a New Scientist article which has been made freely available online.

The article accompanies the launch of Wiseman’s new book, Quirkology, which apparently looks at these sorts of curious research studies in more detail.

He’s also created a very impressive inattentional blindness demonstration video on YouTube. Simple but very cool.

Presumably the gorilla in the background is a nod to Daniel Simons and Chris Chabris’ classic study of the effect, published, rather brilliantly, under the name ‘Gorillas in Our Midst’ [pdf].

It’s the only psychology experiment I’ve ever come across that used a man in a gorilla suit. Unsurprisingly, it won an IgNobel prize, but is actually a valuable contribution to our understanding of the mind.

Link to NewSci article ‘A quirky look at our quirky species’.
Link to cool inattentional blindness demo.

Issue 22 of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just arrived, this time hosted by anthropologist John Hawks.

A couple of my favourites include a compelling article from Madam Fathom on the evolution of the nervous system and another by Pure Pedantry on the complex considerations needed to answer the question ‘Do autistic people have a deficit in reading faces?’.

There are many more great articles in the rest of issue 22.

Link to Encephalon 22.

I just found this interesting snippet in a BBC News story about the development and imminent launch of the new Astute class Navy submarine:

It may be one of the most sophisticated submarines ever built, but the project has been beset with problems. The three submarines are £900m ($1.8bn) over budget and four years behind the original schedule.

But a new boss at Barrow, Murray Easton, introduced big changes when he arrived a few years back.

A team of psychologists was brought into the yard to improve management effectiveness, and to create better ways of communication. Even now a psychologist is present at every board meeting.

I could write everything I know about organisational psychology (psychology applied to business, team work and organisations) on the back of napkin but I’m curious as to what role a psychologist would play at board meetings.

However, while trying to find out (and failing) I found two short articles (one and two) on ‘submarine psychologists’ who work for the Navy researching life on board underwater vessels.

Link to BBC News story ‘Alien submarine breaks technical barriers’.
Link 1 and link 2 to articles on ‘submarine psychologists’.

Alice and Jabberwacky are the world’s leading AI chatbots and they’ve finally met.

The rendezvous is described in an article from Discover magazine, who got in touch to say that it’s a teaser for their already-on-the-shelves special issue ‘The Brain: A User’s Guide’ which seemed to be curiously absent from their website.

The limits of the bots’ abilities are clear from some of the transcripts, but there are some truly sublime moments in their as well:

A: Do you dream?
J: Yes, I dream.
A: It goes without saying. Do you remember your dreams?
J: I remember them vividly.
A: What do you remember about it?
J: I think I shouldn’t flirt with a robot.

If you think robots shouldn’t be flirting with each other, you may want to have a look at a previous Mind Hacks article on the confusion that occurs when humans try their luck with AI systems – either real or imagined.

Link to Discover article ‘I Chat, Therefore I Am…’
Link to Mind Hacks article ‘The Robots are Coming’.